How to shrink long urls

You often encounter a lot of webpages with some rather long URLs. These URLs are a hassle to deal with in terms of memorizing it and sending it to friends via Instant Messaging or e-mail. Luckily there are various free services out there that can shrink this long URL into a shorter version. Before I mention them however, you should be aware that these sites should not be used as domain alternatives. They are simply just for shrinking those pesky long URLs and making them fit in an e-mail etc. And in some cases, in a way that you could write it down in a piece of paper or even memorize it to tell someone else about it.

Also, here's some important info related to those sites. If you just shrink the URL it will return a link with either random letters or numbers (or both) depending on which site you use. If you want a URL that looks something like ShortURL/custom-word-here/ then you should use the custom tag feature. If the word is taken, then choose another word. If the words you choose are all taken, then perhaps add some numbers at the end of the word. For example if you're trying to shrink the URL of a article about dog food and the dogfood tag is taken, then use dogfood34 as that will probably work. Another important thing to note is that the first site I'm going to mention using captcha protection. Which means you need to enter the random letters/numbers that appear before you use it. They are easy to read though so it shouldn't be a problem. If you enter the wrong code, just refresh the page and try again.

The first service I'm going to mention is Pwn and another one is TinyURL I personally prefer the first one I mentioned as there's more custom tags available since it's less used. It also has a shorter URL. But the other one is good as well.

I hope this has helped you in your quest to shorten those long URLs.